The Misadventures of Mark - Episode 3: Real Men Kawai

Giving birth to another human being is a purportedly painful experience.  So, in some ways, it was only fitting that my mom's birthday request was also a "labor of love."

The gift was a piano, one that came with a generous, complimentary installation service, courtesy of "the rest of the family."  Purchasing the piano was easy since dollar bills are relatively light, easily transported objects.  Moving the piano on the other hand.  Well, well.  That was another story.

Another story indeed!  We had to ascend a whole two of them (three if you count this story I'm currently writing, which has involved a lot of retroactive mental lifting just to recall the experience)!

So, how do you move a piano anyway?  I'm glad you asked. The remnants of my muscles are dying to tell you.  After approximately an hour of grunting and groaning, I now consider myself a master in this subject area and completely qualified to answer this daunting question. The way you move a piano is the same way you build a pyramid. You use alien technology and/or a lot of slave labor. Unfortunately for us, we had neither.  All we had were muscles.

The journey begins.  Even the Vanagon groaned a little.

My brother and I both workout regularly. We run. We lift weights. We attempt to eat more frequently from the "my body is a temple menu" than from the "woopie, life is short menu." Let me tell you, though. No matter how much you workout, nothing can prepare you for moving a piano except maybe prior experience with a hernia.

Pianos are not to be trifled with or taken lightly.  Actually, let me rephrase that.  Pianos cannot be taken lightly.

In a non-steroid-infused human, the only muscle group strong enough to move a piano is your legs. Your arms and hands are just handles to use while the rest of your body attempts to hold together.

Thankfully, my brother and I are both blessed with tree trunks for legs. All, the same, moving a piano up a stairway makes you wonder if you won't be taking your own Stairway to Heaven before the end of it.

If you look closely on the stairs, you'll notice we had to take the railings off.  

Somehow, despite the piano's best efforts, we managed to lay the piano to rest before it did the same to us. After much grunting, growing, praying, and a little kawai-ing, we nestled the piano into it's final place.

Phew! I straightened my back and took a breath. Like a cattle brand, the weight of the piano felt forever etched into my muscle fibers, a masochistic diary of each movement. I wouldn't be forgetting this day for a long time to come. But, we had done it!

The piano was all in one piece, and somehow, we were too. Part of me thought that by the time we had finished rolling it to its destination, the sun would have burnt out and perpetual night would have taken over. But it seemed we'd finished before the sun even went down. I guess miracles really do happen.

The brand name Kawai is a sneaky double entendre: part warning, part mirthful laugh. 

Since that day, I've never be able to look at a piano the same way. No longer do I see furnished wood and innocent ebony, ivory keys. Instead, I involuntarily calculate all the paths the lifters must've stumbled through to bring it to its current resting place. 

I'm not what I would consider a wise person, by any means, and most of the time the best advice I could give anyone would be to be wary of advice.  That said, they say wisdom is some strange mix of knowledge, intuition, and experience. Well, after this experience, I think I may have finally gleamed one, lone nugget of wisdom. So future piano owners and home builders.  Please.  Listen up! Don't wait until you have a house to decide if you want a piano. Get the piano first. Build the house around it. You'll thank me later.

Happiness, Gratitude, Rain

Happiness, Gratitude, Rain by Mark Chase

Windows bathed in a sheet of rain
Tears down a face, but not from pain
Happiness is the sight within these eyes
Happiness...enough to cry

You are the rain, I the ground beneath
Flooding with joy, watering with peace
Filling, saturating, blessed beyond measure
Beauty amidst the rain drop weather

On the roof above, a rumbling applause
A thousand hands clapping, the sound of sincere awe
Gratitude found in the spirit of reflection
Two paths and their delicate intersection

The most precious treasure, bathed in firelight
A gift not bought, but given, once a life
A gift to be guarded in the folds of a heart
Flawed, yet perfect, masterpiece of art

Gratitude on the roof
Life on the ground
Sad Happiness on the windows
Love's atmosphere surrounds

[Aside: I couldn't make up my mind whether or not to include illustrations. On the one hand, the words should be doing most of the painting, but on the other hand pictures can be worth a thousand words (or so they say). Basically, I wasn't sure if the pictures would enhance or detract from the poem. So, rather than make this extremely difficult, once-in-a-life-time, course-altering decision, I just included both versions. That way you can appreciate each version, pick your favorite, all without having to travel to a parallel universe where I had decided to post the other. After all, quantum mechanics can get a bit messy.]

Happiness, Gratitude, Rain (Illustrated) by Mark Chase

Windows bathed in a sheet of rain

Tears down a face, but not from pain

Happiness is the sight within these eyes

Happiness...enough to cry

You are the rain, I the ground beneath

Flooding with joy, watering with peace

Filling, saturating, blessed beyond measure

Beauty amidst the rain drop weather

On the roof above, a rumbling applause

A thousand hands clapping, the sound of sincere awe

Gratitude found in the spirit of reflection

Two paths and their delicate intersection

The most precious treasure, bathed in firelight

A gift not bought, but given, once a life

Flawed, yet perfect, masterpiece of art

A gift to be guarded in the folds of a heart

Gratitude on the roof

Life on the ground

Sad Happiness on the windows

Love's atmosphere surrounds

The Misadventures of Mark - Episode 2: Pedal to the Olympic Medal

I had just dropped off my parents' Prius at the dealership for some routine maintenance.  I was happy to help them out.  I just wasn't expecting to risk my life in doing so, nor in such Olympic fashion.

Outside, the rain was trickling down, drizzling like a stopped up sprinkler.  The roads glistened with a lip-gloss sheen.  After dropping off the car, I had elected to bike home for some exercise and fresh air. I wasn't expecting rain.

I was riding along at a pretty good clip.  Not fast enough to make anyone jealous, but with enough top-gear gusto to cover some distance.  That's when it happened.

Like the gears of a meticulously calibrated clock, a series of events set into motion.  Out of the left-hand side-road just ahead of me, a burly pickup pulled forward.  It groaned to a stop with all the grace of an overloaded freight train, but stopped nonetheless.  I figured the driver had seen me.  I continued on, my wheels humming in dual cyclones of rain water.

I began crossing the side-road.  The pickup remained politely stationary.  Then without warning, the pickup began creeping forward, first an innocent roll as if anticipating my passing, then an intentional acceleration as if completely oblivious to my squishy biker presence.

There's a famous math equation in the physics world.  F = MA.  Force equals mass times acceleration.  Put simply, this means the more something weighs and the faster it's going than you, the more it hurts when it hits you.  The burly pickup had me seriously outclassed in both the mass and acceleration department.  Yeah, this was gonna hurt.

I didn't think.  I didn't have time to think.  I just reacted, my body making executive decisions without consulting me first.

My fingers flexed.  I slammed on the brakes.  Like a football player about to be sacked, I veered to the right, attempting to create a pocket of extra space to at least lessen the blow.

My front and back brakes squealed a harrowing harmony.  My knuckles went white and probably my face too.  Like wringing water from a wet washcloth, I desperately tried to squeeze every last drop of stopping power from my meager bike brakes.

Suddenly, the rear brake went limp, abruptly giving out as it disconnected.  The front brake remained engaged.  A pair of poorly balanced math equations, I braced for the inevitable result.

Like their misspelled counterpart suggests, brakes are good at breaking. Especially the back ones.  Especially when you need them the most.

In an instant I was airborne, catapulted like a rock from a piece of siege equipment.  The bike had managed to stop just short of the truck, but I had kept going, locked into my perilous parabola.

For those dying to know what it feels like to be launched from a trebuchet, being thrown from your bike serves as a close approximation.

When you sign up for athletics in school you don't usually do so with the foresight they might one day save your life.  Today, all those years of grueling practices and repetitive drills may have done just that.  In what would become a series of acrobatic maneuvers I credit to a combination of cross-country skiing, running, and track, I managed the impossible.  

Somehow, in a leap frog stunt more nimble than I should be capable of, I pulled my feet up and over the handlebars.  If Jack be nimble and Jack be quick, Mark be nimble and Mark jump far.  Mark jump over the handlebar.

In a midair crouch, I cleared my bike avoiding a devastating trip.  I sailed through the air, and despite embarrassingly little gymnastic experience, I stuck the landing.  Sort of.

I hit the ground on my feet, but off kilter.  Like a skier fumbling through an icy turn, I regained my balance as I stumbled forward.  But balance alone wasn't going to save me.

I had also hit the ground with a generous surplus of momentum, a surplus that my relatively stationary legs weren't ready for.  My body must have reflexively called upon my long dormant 100m dash experience.  Like a sprinter blasting out of the blocks, I surged forward, managing to get my bottom half up to speed with my top half, just in time to avoid a painful pavement face plant.

It felt like I had just won some sort of strange biking-sprinting-crashing-gymnastic hybrid event at the Olympics.  Bike vaulting.  Combining the spectacle of demolition derby with the athletic finesse of the pole vault, I could see bike vaulting really taking off, or at least the riders taking off anyways.  Incorporating the landing pad from the pole vault would probably be a good future addition.  If not a little sorry, I  hoped the man in the truck was at least entertained, maybe even impressed by my performance.  It's not everyday you get to witness the birth of a new sport.

Bike vaulting: coming to an intersection near you!

Almost as instinctively as the rest of my maneuvers, I ran back to my bike and hopped on.  Without missing a beat, I started pedaling as if nothing had happened.  And somehow, miraculously, nothing had happened.  I was 100 percent unscathed.  Like a good little boy, I had been wearing my bike helmet, but thankfully didn't have to use it.  Not this time.  Helmet, bike, and biker would live to bike another day.  Now if only I could get my rear brake working again.

The Hallmark of My 27 Years

Today is my birthday.  In addition to maintaining a miraculous, near-100-percent survival rate for 27 consecutive years, I have a lot to celebrate.  For instance, this year I created a revolutionary home laundry sorting system that drastically reduces the time it takes to do laundry.  My wife not only tolerates me, but even repeatedly insists that she loves me despite my tenacious talent for placing the dish cloth in the wrong spot (there is no greater love than this).  I also continue to be grateful for the kindred camaraderie my brother and I share.  And of course, I'd like to thank my parents, you know, for making this day, and me, possible.  After all, mom and dad did most of the work.  I was just along for the ride, throwing in some crying for good effect.

At lunch today, I received my first birthday present:  A card.  Not a graphics card -- which does happen to be a great gift idea for hardware enthusiasts like myself -- but an actual paper card.

When I was little, I had to open all my cards before my presents.  It was an excruciating exercise in patience while waiting to unwrap the "good stuff."  Today, I count this card as one of the best presents I have received.

A lot of this has to do with the fact this is a card that can't be bought, only made, homemade.  Don't get me wrong, I appreciate a well-chosen, nicely annotated Hallmark card, but you have to admit. There's something special about a homemade card, no matter the caliber of the artwork.

The homemade card came courtesy of my lovely and loving wife.  Not since my "Fiance of the Year Award," have I felt so officially recognized.  For my 27th birthday, she chronicled a whopping 27 reasons to love me (cue audience-wide Awwwww)!  Now, I don't have a "Proof People Love Me" collection (though the more I think about it, it's probably a good idea.  I'm a sensitive soul.), but if I ever start one, this will be one of the premiere pieces.

Inside this artistic masterpiece are "27 Reasons to Love Mark Chase as He Turns 27."  Take note.


27 Reasons to Love Mark Chase as He Turns 27

1)  He composes amazing songs that touch the heart.

2)  His athletic prowess helps him survive close biking encounters.

3)  He can't help but teach other people with the very core of his being.

4)  Computers stand up straight and salute when he walks in a room.

5)  The USA Olympic Snuggling team called to give him a spot in Rio this year.  I told them he was beyond their league.

6)  He believes the best in people, and brings it out.

7)  He has a strong desire to do what's right and see that others are treated fairly and justly.

8)  He would give you the shirt off his back if you asked for it.  That's why he goes shirtless so often.

9)  His laundry organization systems are cheap and effective.

10)  He is a fighter and once he determines to do something, he does not quit.

11)  He is a lover and can give you a bucket of sunshine with his encouragement.

12)  He is patient.  And patient.  And patient.

13)  He is the best dance partner you could bring to a wedding, including your own.

14)  He is a loving, loyal son and will always be there for his parents.

15)  He is a good brother who plays Guild Wars 2 on the regular to combat Veteran Ice Wurms and loneliness.

16)  He builds the best fires, and they're even better when it's rainy or your fireplace gets zero draft.

17)  He cares deeply for the planet and advocates for the beauty of nature.

18)  He loves breakfast as much as I do.

19)  He will bring you your favorite treat when you're bummed to be at work.

20)  His eyes are more expansive and dreamy than the sea.

21)  He is a skillful musician and has a knack for looking "under the hood" of a song.

22)  As a recreation he could still qualify for Guinness speed eating competitions.

23)  Nobody comes close to being such a proficient plate stacker and well-mannered restaurant patron.

24)  He still buys you flowers even when he doesn't see the point.

25)  Even on a bad day, he can climb Mount Marathon faster than you.

26)  He proficiently produces preposterous prose, poignant poetry, plus proprietary poppycock.

27)  He's my favorite man in the whole world, and I wouldn't trade him for anything.

And with that, I would like to give the highest honor bestowable by the 27 years vested in me,  "The Best Birthday Card of the Year Award" to Aimie Chase for her astounding achievements in birthday card technology and unparalleled contributions to the distribution of love.  For this card alone, it was worth turning 27.

You Are My Delight

This year has been one of the toughest of my life.  Both my wife and I have been dealing with unforeseen hardship.  Even though the struggle itself has been trying, it's the length of it that's been the hardest.  It feels like we've been running a race where someone keeps moving the finish line.

Humans aren't well equipped to deal with obstacles that don't have well-defined ends.  Anyone can deal with known difficulties that will pass.  It's the challenges that suggest they could last indefinitely that try to break you.

Even though we are both just ready for this difficult season to be over, I'm grateful for it.  I know that sounds weird, but I think one of the most powerful ways to conqueror difficulties is to be grateful for them.  Difficulties expect you to fight them, but when you can find ways to be thankful, the difficulties kind of just lose their oomph and deflate like an awkwardly activated whoopee-cushion.

For instance, I know this trial is strengthening our marriage.  When we get through this, we are going to have the tried-and-true conviction that we can make it through anything.  I'm grateful for that.

I also think it's going to greatly enhance my already natural gift of empathy.  I've always had an organic compassion for others going through hardships.  It was just in the past, I felt like I was mostly caring for them out of a place of surplus rather than from a place of having-been-there emptiness.  And, really I think that's one of the most powerful things you can give someone:  The hope of having been where they are and somehow pulled through.

Struggles can also give birth to great songs. The following is a song I've tried to write for awhile.  But yesterday, it happened almost effortlessly.  Amidst, a tangle of tears and bed sheets next to my wife, this song came together in the course of about fifteen minutes, chords, melody, lyrics and all.

It's a song that wholeheartedly acknowledges the suffering that is all too real, but simultaneously embraces hope, striving to channel that hope with each note, chord, and lyric.  It's called "You Are My Delight."  Give it a listen.

You Are My Delight
by Mark Chase

You've been pushing long and hard
Heart is heavy, soul is scarred
Can't even walk another mile
Whatever happened to the light in your smile?

But Hope is coming fast today
Hope is coming here to stay
Hope is coming here to say

You are my delight
The sparkle in my eye
The teardrops down my face
Happiness enough to cry

You are my delight
I'll never let you go
I wrote this song
So that you'd always know

Trapped by the lies in your head
Curling up in this unmade bed
Finish line not even in sight
Will we make it through the night?